Friday, August 17, 2012

Nick Gruen on New Thinking on Current Problems

Nick Gruen, a leading economist
and lateral thinker in Australia, interviewed in The Zone, in the Sydney Morning Herald, Full Transcript HERE

Much of it
covers topics of new perspectives on society and government from the frontiers
of modern thinking, somewhat beyond me, coming from over a generation earlier than Nick...(half joking).

I extract an early part of the exchange that I did understand between the SMH
interviewer, Michael Short (MS) and Nick (NG):

NG: “...Think what happens
when you get on a tram. There are quite elaborate social rules about how we
interact, what space is public and personal, what’s private, We have an entire
system of mores that governs these things. The first book that the first modern
economist, Adam Smith wrote – a book he and his contemporaries preferred to the
Wealth of Nations was on this very topic – about the evolution of social mores
as a public good (though he didn’t use that term).

We don't really
think like that, and I think that there are lots of quite exciting avenues for
doing things better if we do think like that."

MS: "There is a
danger though Nicholas, isn't there [?], on that sympathies argument in that there
is no monopoly on morality. The left would sort of say `we are the good guys’,
whereas there would be a lot of people on the quote right unquote who would
argue freer markets in the community and society is what creates wealth and
lifts people out of poverty and therefore it is offensive to be told by people
on the left that they are the good guys and that the people on the right – in
inverted commas again, because I don't like the language – are the bad guys. I
just don't think that is helpful in public debate."

NG: "I couldn't agree
more. The best example of that is Adam Smith. Adam Smith was left-wing; there
is no question about Adam Smith being left-wing. He was a favourite of the
French revolutionaries, and the reason he was in favour of freer markets is
that he felt that markets had been rigged by the powerful for the powerful.

The example that
most people are familiar with is tariffs and Mercantilism, but in fact there
was an archaic institution in his day and age, which was apprenticeship, which
was a creature of the apprenticeship laws. They told you that if you were an
apprentice, you were a sort of indentured labourer to your master and you had
no right to go and get another job or even move counties. So, Smith was
trenchantly against that sort of thing. As the nineteenth century founder of
the Austrian school of economics Carl Menger pointed out, of all Adam Smith’s
comments on such matters, he always writes with sympathy for the poor and the
weak and against the wealthy and the privileged."

MS: “To finish the
point, the thing that annoys me about the so-called right is that they often
appear to me to be into a free market for everything but ideas. If you disagree
with them, you are at best well-meaning but misguided, which is a very
condescending view. And the thing that annoys me about the so-called left, as
you just said, is this pathological appropriation of the moral high-ground.”

NG: “I agree with
that. But re what you've just said about the right about ideas; the right would
complain that is what the left have been doing to them for years, and so they
are getting a bit of their own back. There's not much point in that kind of
thing. I mean solidarity has its uses in human life but not particularly in
trying to think about ideas. But unfortunately it's a habit.”

Comment

Nick Gruen has been
a correspondent with Lost Legacy since 2005 and we have exchanged papers and
ideas over that period.He is
knowledgeable of the authentic Adam Smith and of both TMS and WN.

I agree with his
interpretations of Adam Smith – he wrote some interesting applications of Smith’s
moral sentiments to the work of Jane Austen, showing an educated appreciation
of both Smith and literature.

I recommend readers
to follow the link above to read the interview in full.There is also a video link provided by the
Sydney Morning Herald.

A brief look Nick's views on the
current possibilities for the near future is also worth your time.

7 Comments:

Thanks for this Gavin, I thought for a while there, as I started reading your piece that you were going to take me to task for saying Adam Smith was this or that - in this case 'left wing'.

Of course one requires the reader to use their interpretive intelligence when hearing or reading one's words, and I was relieved to see that you took the comment in the spirit it was offered.

The other thing - which is an interesting thing I think - is that I was using Smith in the context of nevertheless being interested in conveying my thoughts on contemporary issues. Of course I don't want to misrepresent Smith, and I don't want to present some cardboard cutout of him - because then there'd be no real point in using him to deepen my argument or elaboration. But if one is using him to illustrate the present, the present is where one's focus is, so it's inevitable that one will not do justice to Smith.

Anyway, thanks for not pulling me up on my saying he was 'left wing'. This was just after I'd said in the interview that the terms 'left' and 'right' can still make sense as labels for the focus of one's sympathies, fears and hopes, even if we should subject all proposals for making the world a better place to analytical rather than ideological scrutiny .

I just cannot understand how anyone could put Adam Smith into the Left/Right paradigm, especially by the definition of Left/Right as established by the Left.

Please forgive me for not being able to quote chapter and verse at the moment, but Smith was as dismissive of "public spirited" endeavours and Utopian fantasy as he was of the corrupt mercantile system. Unfortunately (or fortunately for Smith depending on your perspective) Smith was a century and a half removed from Leftist social engineering experiments on any consequential or remark worthy scale.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but Smith seemed not only skeptical, but down right dismissive of any attempts at large scale social or economic engineering.

I just cannot understand how anyone could put Adam Smith into the Left/Right paradigm, especially by the definition of Left/Right as established by the Left.

Please forgive me for not being able to quote chapter and verse at the moment, but Smith was as dismissive of "public spirited" endeavours and Utopian fantasy as he was of the corrupt mercantile system. Unfortunately (or fortunately for Smith depending on your perspective) Smith was a century and a half removed from Leftist social engineering experiments on any consequential or remark worthy scale.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but Smith seemed not only skeptical, but down right dismissive of any attempts at large scale social or economic engineering.

NicholasI didn't open a discussion on Adam Smith ' Left or Right'? as that was not my purpose in posting your interview on the SMH.These distinction became identified at the end of Smith's life. He would not have known of them, any more than he knew the word "capitalism".I am not out to convert the world! I just thought your interview was interesting. That's all.Gavin

PhilustusThanks.Your reference is to his piece on 'A man of system' in Part IV of Moral Sentiments - the invisible hand chapter, and his scepticism of utopia is in Wealth Of Nations.I agree with your general points.Gavin

Yes, Gavin and philistus, in all these things it depends on how one is using words. Despite our endless dismissals the idea of left and right continue to live on in our imaginations today - even in our denials of their relevance. I think we could all agree that they went through a period of reasonable clarity for a period, though of course bifurcating the world of political ideology into two poles does violence to pretty much everyone.

It's also true that the terms arrived after Smith's writing. (Perhaps technically they existed in 1790, I guess they did by 1789, but they'd not become the juggernauts that they became later.)

But it seems to me that my definition of the residue of 'left and right' is a reasonable one - suggesting that it's one of sympathies and anxieties. By that definition Smith was left wing - he sympathised with the weak and poor more than the strong and wealthy and he felt that society could be made more free without falling apart. Both of these ideas are 'left' in the sense I'm using the term.

Likewise, though the best education I ever got was in history and so I abhor silly anachronism, it is reasonable to suggest that such common sympathies have some correspondence through time. So while the term 'left wing' didn't exist, it isn't outlandish to describe Gerard Winstanley or the diggers in the English Civil War as 'left wing' in some sense.

But if one uses left to mean 'tolerant of large scale social engineering' then I agree, Smith wasn't left. Then again, I can't see him voting for a guy like Paul Ryan! But then that's just (provocative) speculation!